In the fourth act of Pygmalion, Colonel Pickering complains, “Well, I feel a bit tired. It’s been a long day. The garden party, a dinner party, and the opera! Rather too much of a good thing.” And I realised, hearing this line at yesterday’s matinee, that he might have been talking about my sort of day, one had actually led me - for the first time in memory - to actually be late for that performance.
I’m usually obsessive about time-keeping — and particularly about curtain up times — so I invariably aim to arrive at the theatre at least half an hour before a performance is due to start; turning up late for a performance as a critic is like getting late to the office for others. But of course everyone does it, from time to time; there was one occasion when the Telegraph’s Charlie Spencer was browsing in a record shop before a Donmar Warehouse press night, only to realise his watch had stopped - and he’d missed the first half hour!
It’s one thing, though, for the audience to be late, but quite another for the actors.
That’s why sign-in rules are that actors must do so at the stage door “at the half”, which is half an hour before beginners’ calls - itself five minutes before curtain up - so in fact means they must sign in by 35 minutes before the designated starting time. I once heard, however, that Betty Buckley was so notoriously tardy about getting to the theatre during an off-Broadway run of a musical she was in that the management was considering posting a notice in the lobby: “Latecomers will be admitted before the performance begins”.
Yesterday it was my turn: I’d put in one too many things to do before I got there and was then held up in bad traffic. Funnily enough, that is precisely what happened to my partner for the Old Vic’s last production, Speed-the-Plow, so I knew the drill. The Old Vic shows you to a latecomers’ monitor, and then allows you in during a suitable break; both Speed-the-Plow and Pygmalion have curtain drops built in, so there are natural breaks (I always wonder about the effectiveness of storing up latecomers for productions that don’t have them, and allowing them in en masse at designated points - as they do at the National, for instance - thereby causing moments of mass disruption rather than a few little ones.)
But coming in after the first short act of Pygmalion I was therefore going to disturb no one - and a long set change meant there was ample time to do so - except that I was shown to the wrong side of the theatre, so couldn’t get to my seat anyway. Instead, I found an empty seat towards the back - and soon realised that I was in the midst of a girls’ school party, which is usually one of my nightmare scenarios. But this class was impeccably behaved, which proves that it can be done.
At least I didn’t have far to go to the next show. I only had to cross the road to the Young Vic for the evening opening of The Good Soul of Szechuan, though the journey that the play and this production takes you on is much further - though it is also paradoxically sadly close to home at the moment (and I don’t mean because I live less than a ten minute walk from the Young Vic). Until this week, I’d barely heard of that Chinese province outside of this play’s title (but then geography has never been my strongest suit); but now we’re hearing about it daily, thanks to the earthquake that struck there on Monday and has already killed 15,000 - with a further 26,000 estimated still to be buried beneath rubble, so that toll is certain to rise.
Early on in the play, the Gods (who come to Szechuan to find if there are any good people left on earth) speculate with the water seller Wang about disasters in another province. “And why is that do you think?” Wang replies, “Cause they’ve got no respect for the Gods”. Second God replies, “Rubbish. It’s because they never repair their dam”. That, of course, brings human culpabilities in seemingly natural disasters close to home, but doesn’t help to explain earthquakes.
But how to explain something else: the complete (and no doubt pricey) transformation of the Young Vic to accommodate the play? This question was asked of me, not by a God but someone who is near enough: the saintly Benedict (Nightingale, critic of The Times), who was sitting behind me. I told him my theory - and he said he may have to borrow it! (I’ll see if he has when I read his review). Which, of course, is one of the dangers of discussing a play in the interval with one’s colleagues; but I’m happy to allow Ben to steal it if he has, since it was his birthday yesterday!
Another occupational hazard of going to the theatre is whether one will survive the seats, or sometimes, whether the seats will survive us! According to the Evening Standard’s Londoner’s Diary yesterday, the previous night’s opening night of The Deep Blue Sea at the Vaudeville found Charlie Spencer in an undignified fall from grace: “One moment Spencer was there, scribbling away in his notebook. The next - crack! - he was sitting on the floor. The pleasingly rotund critic was found another seat but at half time the producer at the Vaudeville Theatre Nica Burns told him: ‘Charlie, you must have been eating too much!’
Perhaps Nica can road-test the seats for those of us of the plumper persuasion before we get there in future. I am catching up with it on Saturday night, and hope my seat is reinforced by then. But, as I told Charlie last night, I actually broke my bed last week; I trust we weren’t doing the same thing at the time.
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